Why I am an anti-Zionist Jew

The Israeli government deliberately invokes terrorist attacks, rockets, and scary brown men in headscarfs to stoke the population's fear, but I am scared of the racism Zionists use to justify the occupation. Originally published August 2014.

'Not in our name': members of Jewdas at a Free Palestine demo, 2014. Credit: Ray Filar.

“I was in prison for eleven years,”
says Munib, angrily. He explains how his Israeli jailers would make
him stand in water: “Up to my neck, for three days”. He
gesticulates, showing how he was also electrocuted on the leg, as we
drive the narrow road to Bil'in, a tiny
Palestinian village south of Jerusalem, next to the separation
wall.

I am in the West Bank to understand why
everything I have been taught is wrong. Munib is there because –
though constantly under attack - Palestine is his home. The facts are
casual to him, but they are told with fury.

Later I speak with Ertefaa, a
self-deprecating Palestinian woman who works at the refugee centre in
Aida camp near Bethlehem, where 5000 Palestinian refugees live in
cramped confines: “My husband was in jail twice, six months. My
brothers were imprisoned. The brothers of my husband, two brothers,
were killed – four months in between both of them. My daughter's
husband was also imprisoned.”

As a child I learned that “the
Israel/Palestine conflict” is highly complex, with a long history
of wrongs on both sides. Growing up as a member of an orthodox
synagogue, pro-Israel politics were the norm, and certain kinds of
questions frowned upon. Zionists
– those who believe Israel should be a Jewish homeland - say it is
us vs. them: the victimised Jews against the murderous Arabs. To
condemn Israeli human rights abuses is to ignore the Jewish history
of persecution that makes the modern Israeli mentality intelligible.

But the reality is much more simple.
Today the so-called “Jewish, democratic state” is synonymous with
daily brutality, land occupation, militarism, settlements, and
dispossession. Though varying
forms of Zionist thought exist – each imbues the worthwhile aim
of protecting the Jewish people with nationalist imperative. For us
to be safe, the thinking goes, we must have our own country. To keep
the country safe, we must use force to keep out threats. Because the
people living there don't like us pushing them out, they are by
definition threatening, and in need of suppression.

Invoking security as the reason to
maintain a ethno-religious majority in an area where no
such majority exists, Zionists simultaneously dream up a mass of
bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorists. But to homogenize all
Palestinians is fundamentally racist.

Despite all this, at Sunday morning
Hebrew school, Diaspora Jews like me learn to celebrate the 1948
Declaration of Independence, with nothing said about what this meant
for the 700,000 Palestinians who were ethnically
cleansed or displaced from their homes. I was taught that any
criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, means that you want to see Israel
destroyed and the Jewish people evicted.

At 19, at the time of a university
occupation against Operation Cast Lead, I found out for the first
time that many people thought Zionism was wrong, that massacring the
people living in Gaza could not be justified as self-defense. I was
shocked, then angry, then upset. A combination of revisionist history
and group mentality maintains a significant Zionist consensus among
Diaspora Jews – we see Palestinians living in poverty, their
families killed and their homes destroyed, and are told that this is
because Hamas does not care for its own people...unlike Israel.

Operation Protective Edge, in which
over 1900
Palestinians and nearly 70 Israelis have now been killed, is just
the most recent, inevitable consequence of a brutal,
militaristically-advanced settler-colonial occupation encroaching on
the lives and lands of a subjugated people – using a 30-foot wall,
settlements, missiles, tanks and the withholding of basic human
necessities to perpetrate continued domination. This form of
militarism is not specific to Israel – the Islamic
State,
the treatment of Native
Americans in the USA, and South African apartheid bear comparison
- but that doesn't make it any more defensible.

People arguing in favour of Israel
often play on its relative democracy and tolerance, its status as a
beacon of enlightenment in the savage east. But Israel today is
obsessed with ethnic purity – its more totalitarian policies
strategically enacted out of sight of Tel Aviv's bougie bars and
beaches.

While in Israel this year
I lost count of the number of times I was quizzed as to my religious
heritage by random Israelis. The question,“Are you a Jew?” was
asked of me more in a month than at any other time in my life.
Refusing to answer caused some consternation – and where all
interactions are guided by fears of the Palestinian majority, of the
loss of “the Jewish democratic state”, I can see why. As a
counterpoint I also experimented with purposefully telling
Palestinians that I am Jewish, the primary reaction being surprise,
then pleasure, and the short response: “welcome”.

In this way Israel is characterized by
the twin paranoias of security and ethnicity. The government pretends
that ever increasing policing of Palestinian identities is what will
eventually lead to Jewish safety – but the continual violent
suppression of another group will only cause violent resistance.

The policing is enacted through daily
indignities, including restrictions on freedom of movement. Military
checkpoints like Qalandia – which guards the route between the West
Bank and Jerusalem - exemplify the harsh reality of occupation. With
its blackened concrete towers and enclaves of barbed wire, Qalandia
is strategically designed to convey a message to Palestinians: you
are criminals.

To cross the checkpoint you queue in
steel bar enclosed cages barely wide enough for one person to stand,
surrounded by rubbish and asinine “keep clean” signs. IDF guards
bellow through loudspeakers from behind small, plastic windows:
“Israel forever” is graffitied onto one window, next to a Star of
David. Travelling to Jerusalem one day on a Palestinian coach, I was
surprised when the majority of the people got off the coach and stood
outside in a queue, leaving three other non-Palestinians and me.

As a white tourist I was allowed to
stay on the coach, treated politely by teenage, machine-gun wielding
IDF soldiers, while people in their own country were routinely lined
up outside, treated as suspicious terrorist others.

These facts of Palestinian life don't
gel with what pro-Israel Diaspora Jews believe about Israelis and
Palestinians. Zionist Jews simply do not comprehend that the only
people who are in real danger of being made refugees are the
Palestinians, that while Israelis stress the abstract right to exist,
Palestinians are being killed in their thousands. Like other
neoliberal states, Israeli government strategy deliberately plays on
the population's existential fear: invoking terrorist attacks,
rockets, and frightening brown men in headscarfs. This enables the
occupation to entrench itself across land it is not entitled to.

All of this erases an important
anti-Zionist Jewish tradition.
While today a majority of observing Jews identify with the state of
Israel, there is both a growing and visible minority of anti- and
non-Zionist Jews, and a rich history of anti-Zionism within Judaism.
Political movements like The Jewish
Labour Bund and thinkers such as Abraham Serfaty, Emma
Goldman and Leon
Trotsky are often ignored or dismissed as “self-hating
traitors”.In the UK today groups like Jews
for Justice for Palestinians, Jewdas,
Young
Jewish Left and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist networkare active voices against the
occupation.

In practice Zionism is
indistinguishable from the Israeli nationalism that sees the
oppression of Palestinians like Ertefaa or Munib as necessary
collateral for Jewish survival. Those who support Israel are buying
into the idea that Palestinian lives are worth less than those of
Jews. A cursory glance at prisoner exchange numbers is demonstrative:
in 2011 IDF soldier Gilad Shalit was exchanged for 1027 Palestinians.

This month, hundreds of thousands of
people have demonstrated worldwide against the massacre in Gaza.
Marching in London with the Jewish bloc has been a powerful
experience. Under the banner “not in my name”, we show that
Israel does not speak for all Jews.

Some names have been changed.

About the author

Ray Filar is a freelance journalist and an editor at openDemocracy, working on the Transformation section. Their writing has been published in The Guardian, The Times, and the New Statesman, among others. They are the editor of Resist! Against a precarious future (Lawrence & Wishart, 2015), a book about young people and politics. They tweet, @rayfilar, their website is here.

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